Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/677

. 6.] done as good, not for the sake of goodness; for to call an act good means that it is the full activity or self.

It will take us back to our starting-point and round out the argument, if we note the fact that this division of the self into two separate selves (one the realized self, the other the ideal self), is again the fallacy of hypostatizing into separate entities what in reality are simply two stages of insight upon our own part. This ‘realized self’ is no reality by itself; it is simply our partial conception of the self erected into an entity. Recognizing its incomplete character, we bring in what we have left out and call it the ‘ideal self.’ Then by way of dealing with the fact that we have not two selves here at all, but simply a less and a more adequate insight into the same self, we insert the idea of one of these selves realizing the other. We have an insight which first takes the activity abstractly, and, by cutting off some of its intrinsic relations, arrests it and makes of it a merely realized, or past self; when we perceive these intrinsic relations, instead of using them to correct our previous idea, thus grasping the one continuous activity, we set them off by themselves as ideal–as something to be realized. Such is the natural history of the fixed distinction between the realized and the ideal self. It has same source as the process which gives rise to the notion of capacities as possibilities in general.

The more one is convinced that the pressing need of the day, in order to make headway against hedonistic ethics on one side and theological ethics on the other, is an ethics rooted and grounded in the self, the greater is the demand that the self be conceived as a working, practical self, carrying within the rhythm of its own process both ‘realized’ and ‘ideal’ self. The current ethics of the self (falsely named Neo-Hegelian, being in truth Neo-Fichtean) are too apt to stop with a metaphysical definition, which seems to solve problems in general, but at the expense of the practical problems which alone really